KU Open Insights: Happy New Year

KU Open Insights

Thanks for reading our monthly newsletter KU Open Insights, where you receive the latest in Open Access news every month. This will include updates from KU about our progress and future plans, as well as stories from the Open Access community in general. The newsletter also acts as an open invitation for you as a publisher or librarian to get in touch and find out more about how you can get involved. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

All the best from Berlin,

Hannah from the KU Press Office

KU Select 2017

First and foremost, a very happy New Year from everyone here in the KU office. Thank you to every one of our friends, colleagues, and OA advocates who have supported us in 2017 – we are very excited to work with you once again in 2018!

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We had a very busy December here in Berlin finalising the pledging period for KU 2017 collections (including our Book Collection, Journal Collection, and our partnership with Language Science Press). Thanks to huge support from libraries from across the world we were able to grow KU Select 2017 by 20% on the previous year. Since it began in 2012, KU has now supported the unlatching of more than 1200 titles. This means than more than 10% of all titles registered in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) are there with the help of KU!

While we are really proud of the progress we and the whole community have made, funding for some of our KU Select 2017 books and journals did not reach the levels we had hoped for. Thanks to the vision and commitment of publishers we have, however, managed to finance the majority of titles. Going forward, we would underline the importance of the whole library community showing their support and coming together to make OA work.

This January we are getting back to work, and beginning the unlatching of our KU Select 2017 Journals and Books. More information and updates can be found on our website, as well as by following us on twitter. As always, we will be providing libraries with enriched MARC records to improve the discoverability of titles. If you have any questions about unlatching, MARC records or anything else, please feel free to let me know.
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KU 2018

Over the course of 2017 we have been discussing the future of OA with libraries and the community as a whole. In response, we have a number of exciting projects planned for 2018. These include partnerships with Luminos (University of California Press), HAU Books, OAPEN, and The Open Commons of Phenomenology, alongside the launch of a French language collection with OpenEdition. While we will continue with our HSS collection, we will also launch KU Select Science & Technology (STEM) 2018 for the first time.

So as the new year begins, we’re excited to be getting back in the office and getting on with making OA work. We’re looking forward to working with all of you in the coming year and, once again, a huge thank you for all your support – we couldn’t have done it without you!

Thanks for reading! Please get in touch to tell us your stories on Open Access and feel free to share this newsletter with others in the community